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Reader's Corner - The Library of Utopia + resource links
IainB:
Just when you think there is evidence of real progress on the freedom of knowledge front and some growth in the Libray of Utopia, you find evidence that some psychopathic corporation wants to own that knowledge by proxy, and tithe you for it - it's Elsevier, of course.
From VentureBeat - Business:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from journal publisher Elsevier
December 6, 2013 4:51 PM
Jordan Novet
Image: Kang Xu, a scientist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
Academia.edu wants to help researchers share their scientific papers freely. But at least one publisher of academic journals has more, well, nuanced thoughts on access to the research — and it’s issued requests for thousands of papers to be dropped from the site.
The news surfaced in a post on Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, a blog about open access.
In response to Elsevier’s requests, Academia.edu has sent messages to several academics on the site to let them know their papers have been removed. And that’s gotten a lot of people talking on Twitter.
In an email to VentureBeat, Richard Price, Academia.edu’s chief executive, told a bit of the backstory.
“In the past, Elsevier has sent out one or two DMCAs a week,” Price wrote. “Then, a few weeks ago, Elsevier started sending Academia.edu DMCA take-down notices in batches of a thousand for papers that academics had uploaded to the site. This is what has caused the recent outcry in the blogosphere and Twitter.”
The message Academia.edu sent out casts Elsevier as getting in the way of Academia.edu’s very mission:
Academia.edu is committed to enabling the transition to a world where there is open access to academic literature. Elsevier takes a different view, and is currently upping the ante in its opposition to academics sharing their own papers online.
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has a statement from an Elsevier executive. “We aim to ensure that the final published version of an article is readily discoverable and citable via the journal itself in order to maximize the usage metrics and credit for our authors, and to protect the quality and integrity of the scientific record,” the executive, Tom Reller, told the Chronicle in an email.
Still, Elsevier’s ramping up of take-down requests is reminiscent of the shake-up happening as a result of the rise of massively open online courses, which have enabled millions to learn at a high level — for free. It could be that the basic premise of Academia.edu will throw things off kilter for publishers and cause them to react. And it even has a bit of the flavor of Aaron Swartz’s efforts to liberate academic papers from the premium site JSTOR.
Price thinks things could be changing on the openness front.
“Perhaps the most interesting point here is that the tides are shifting in the academic community’s overall attitude toward open science, and that increasingly scientists and researchers want to be able to share their papers online,” he wrote in his email.
Academia.edu, a five-year-old site, claims nearly six million academics have signed up on it. It recently took on $11.1 million in funding to grow, the its community has a shot at growing further, which could raise the stakes for publishers.
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IainB:
I can't believe that I never knew of this until now, nor that DC Forum hasn't already listed it (well, I can't find a reference here to GEgeek anyway) - it's a large and useful categorised collection of links to information, knowledge and tools - http://www.gegeek.com/. I am sure that a lot of the content will have been collected from other sites that we know of, but this looks like someone has independently taken the idea of an IT categorised index of useful information, knowledge and tools rather seriously.
Maybe this could be an opening into what I referred to as Cayce's mythical Atlantean "Hall of Records" - here.
I got the reference from this post in Geek Squeak:
(Copied below sans embedded images.)
GEEK SQUEAK – If You Are An IT Professional, You Must Bookmark This Site
Wednesday, February 5th, 2014 at 2:42 pm
I don’t know if you have ever noticed, but at the top of the site there is a tab labelled GEGeek. Please take a moment and click on the tab and you will be taken to a website that has everything, and I mean everything, that an IT Professional would ever need. All in one place… I often spend time exploring there because there is so much to see (and to learn).
The site administrator of GEGeek is an IT Professional by trade, who labels himself a geek, who works for GE Medical Systems as a X-Ray & PACS IT Field Engineer and has grown up with Microsoft Windows (ever since the IBM AT/XT was introduced back in 1983).
At the very tip top of site you will find a link labelled, “GE Tech Toolkit”, which is a downloadable FREEBIE toolkit that has been put together by the site administrator. Be prepared, this toolkit is an awesome collection that is 2.85 GB in size.
Tech Toolkit - it's FREE!
A complete collection of over 250 Portable Freeware Tech Related programs, all accessible from one Menu Launcher Utility. There’s even a program to update all the essential programs automatically, all contained on a USB?Flash drive for travel. It’s a Personal tool kit GEGeek put together for his job and peers that he is sharing with everyone to help make everyone’s jobs a little easier. So Enjoy!!
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40hz:
I can't believe that I never knew of this until now, nor that DC Forum hasn't already listed it (well, I can't find a reference here to GEgeek anyway) - it's a large and useful categorised collection of links to information, knowledge and tools - http://www.gegeek.com/. I am sure that a lot of the content will have been collected from other sites that we know of, but this looks like someone has independently taken the idea of an IT categorised index of useful information, knowledge and tools rather seriously.
Maybe this could be an opening into what I referred to as Cayce's mythical Atlantean "Hall of Records" - here.
-IainB (February 07, 2014, 02:19 AM)
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@IainB - That's an awesome find! This could save a lot of people hours and hours of research and web browsing. Took a quick look and he apparently has ALL the good stuff in one convenient, well-organized site. Brill for sure! :Thmbsup:
IainB:
...This could save a lot of people hours and hours of research and web browsing. Took a quick look and he apparently has ALL the good stuff in one convenient, well-organized site. ...
-40hz (February 07, 2014, 10:53 AM)
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Yea, that's what I reckoned too - a real potential timesaver.
(By the way, nice surrealistic picture of the library.)
40hz:
(By the way, nice surrealistic picture of the library.)
-IainB (February 08, 2014, 12:54 AM)
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It's by Ron Gonsalves, one of my favorite magical-realist illustrators. He combines a bit of René Magritte, M.C. Escher, James C. Christensen, Chris Van Allsburg, and Kit Williams - but in a style still very much his own. It's from a picture book he did with Sarah L. Tompson titled Imagine a Day.
The caption reads:
Imagine a day...
...when a book swings open
on silent hinges
and a place you've never been before
welcomes you home.
Here's another from its companion book Imagine a Night that, to my mind, captures the essence of storytelling:
Imagine a night...
...when the space between words
becomes like the space
between trees:
wide enough
to wander in.
Wonderful illustrator. Most wonderful books! :Thmbsup:
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